We are happy to announce The Field Museum of Chicago is the newest MJV partner, bringing their urban conservation perspectives and expertise to monarch conservation. Their partnership is spurred by a recently initiated project in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to create landscape conservation designs for several urban areas along the monarch’s eastern flyway. MJV and our partners have been involved in this project thus far and are excited to strengthen urban conservation efforts for monarchs through with the addition of The Field Museum to our partnership.
The Field Museum is partnering with the USFWS Landscape Conservation Cooperatives and the Ecological Places in Cities (EPIC) Network to create an urban conservation plan for the monarch butterfly. The project hopes to address the following questions: what contribution can urban areas make to monarch conservation; where should we focus this work to achieve the best ecological and social results; and how should we best engage various urban sectors and residents in this project?
The project has four steps: 1) develop an urban monarch conservation framework to help guide efforts across the flyway; 2) develop urban monarch landscape conservation designs (LCDs) for Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Kansas City, and Austin metropolitan areas; 3) implement and evaluate on-the-ground projects referencing the prototype LCDs; and 4) hold a workshop with a mid-continent migratory pathway focus to integrate individual LCDs into a cross-regional approach. In the end, The Field Museum and partners aim to describe the desired types, amounts, and distribution of monarch/pollinator habitat opportunities in urban settings across the eastern flyway.
This urban monarch conservation project and the new collaborations formed as a result of it are exciting progress, and we look forward to the outcomes of this new partnership.
For more information about The Field Museum, please visit their website. If you are interested in the urban monarch conservation initiative being led by the Field Museum, please contact Becky Collings (rcollings@fieldmuseum.org).
The content in this article does not necessarily reflect the positions of all Monarch Joint Venture partners. Header photo by Laura Milkert.